For this assignment, we were instructed to complete a search on any topic that interested us through the use of three different search engines and three meta-search engines. Since I have a strong I have a strong passion for sports and specifically the University of Oregon, I chose to search “Oregon Ducks” to compare the different results. 

During my search, I noticed that each search engine and meta-search engine had goducks.com as the first result, which I expected since it is the official athletics website for the University of Oregon. To my surprise, Bing was the only search engine that had almost the same line up of the first five results as the meta-search engines including Bleacher Report. I was pretty shocked to find that each of the meta-search engines I used (Dogpile, Webcrawler, and Metacrawler) had the exact same first five results. The consistent top result (including apparel on Yahoo) was Oregon Ducks Football in comparison to the other athletics or the University’s academics.

Yahoo had only shopping websites for the first five results with nothing on the “Oregon Ducks” result page letting me know if it was an Ad. The other search engines had some ads for the first couple results, but it was clearly and visibly stated unlike the search engine Yahoo. Google and Bing both had goducks.com as the top result when I searched, however Google had the website header as “University of Oregon Athletics – Official Athletics Website” versus Bing which had the website header as “Oregon Ducks”. However, Google was the only search engine that had an article for the 2020 NFL Scouting Combine. With Bing’s first five results almost exact to the meta-search engines, the only exception was the fourth and fifth results on the Oregon Ducks team.

The chart below (and attached in the following link described as “Unit 4 Information Literacy Basics Part 1”) displays the 30 results from the three search engines and three meta-search engines as a reference. Unit 4 Information Literacy Basics Part 1